Well, at least he's reading.

Muckraking at the multiplex? What’s up with that? Doesn’t Michael Moore know that movies, especially summer movies that hit number one at the weekend box office, are supposed to be about superheroes or robots or wizards? Maybe a renegade cop who plays by his own rules, but that’s it, that’s about as realistic as it gets. What’s this guy doing, showing us stuff that we don’t want to think about, that makes us uncomfortable, that makes us angry?

Moore, the lefty documentarian whose films have previously taken on big business and America’s gun culture, here goes after the Bush administration, their inept war on terror, their all too successful war on our civil liberties and the lies they told us to justify the war in Iraq. (Hey, at least I’m not making a pretense of objectivity.) As usual, he uses stunts and humor to couch some pretty serious points.

Controversial? Hell yeah. Balanced? No, not really. Frankly, that doesn’t bother me in the slightest because Moore has the facts behind him. If you want to interpret those facts in a different way that’s your business, but damn, you’ve got to admit that they paint a pretty disconcerting picture of a self-serving, self-righteous administration in bed with powerfulcorporate interests. An administration that’s using the tragedies of September 11 as an excuse to stifle opposing voices. An administration willing to risk the lives of our troops for reasons that are at best dubious, at worst completely trumped up.

Okay, Moore sometimes goes too far even for me. Some of the connections he makes seem tenuous and in his zeal to draw a sinister picture of the relationship between the Bush administration and the Saudi government he comes off as a bit xenophobic. But he gets major points for bringing up things that nobody else seems willing to talk about. We need that right now. Fahrenheit 9/11 paints a chilling picture, and if you don’t come out of it at least a little bit outraged, you weren’t paying attention.

Gorilla Pants rating: 3 out of 4 bananas